Ron Rash Quotes & Sayings

So people surprise us. They can lie to each other, as my brother had done to me, and as I had lied to him that September evening at Panther Creek, and now it appeared those two lies could only lead to one imponderable truth. — Ron Rash

The name's Old Testament derivation did not surprise him. Campbell's first name was Exra, and there was an Absalom and a Solomon in the camp. But no Lukes or Matthews, which Buchanan had once noted, telling Pemberton that from his research the highlanders tended to live more by the Old Testament than the New. — Ron Rash

One of my goals is to allow readers to see my characters and the world they inhabit as vividly as possible. — Ron Rash

Something Rich and Strange
She was less of what she had been, the blue rubbed from her eyes, flesh freed from the chandelier of bone. He touched what once had been a hand. The river whispered to him that it would not be long now. — Ron Rash

Another memory comes, not of the final time I saw Ligeia but a week before she disappeared, something mundane yet vivid. The mystery of memory. There's surely some scientific explanation for why the brain decides Don't let go of this. I've read novels and cannot recall a single character's name and yet I remember a red bicycle glanced once in a hardware-store window, a mole on a stranger's chin, a kitchen match lying beside a hearth. These remain, as does Ligeia reaching into her locker, a book crooked in her arm sliding free. — Ron Rash

Others can make us vulnerable and the sooner such vulnerabilities are dealt with the better — Ron Rash

Furthermore, even if ideas were gettable - say, stacked in a secluded cave like the Dead Sea scrolls - I wouldn't go there. An 'idea,' especially one adhered to from start to finish, can be disastrous for a compelling piece of fiction. — Ron Rash

What I've become convinced makes a writer are the days you hate it, the days you'd rather stick those pencils in your eyes. Sometimes I almost punish myself - if I'm not going be able to write, I'm not going be able to do anything else. I just sit there and wait. — Ron Rash

One thing's sure and nothing surer. The rich get richer and the poor get- children — Ron Rash

It was the kind of early-fall day Rachel had always loved, not warm or cold, the sky all deep-blue and cloudless and no breeze, the crops proud and ripe and the leaves so pretty but hardly a one yet fallen
a day so perfect that the earth itself seemed sorry to let it pass, so slowed down its roll into evening and let it linger. — Ron Rash

Wisely reconsidered and let the hand — Ron Rash

And darkness. You can't see it no more than you can see air, but when it's all around you sure enough know it. — Ron Rash

I missed that one,' Henryson said. 'The war, I mean.'
'Don't worry,' Snipes said. 'Another one's always coming down the pike. That's something all your historians and philosophers agree on. A feller over in Germany looks to be ready to set a match to Europe soon enough, and quick as they snuff him out there'll be another to take his place. — Ron Rash

You men notice so little, Pemberton. Physical strength is your gender's sole advantage. — Ron Rash

Jacob closed his eyes but did not sleep. Instead, he imagined towns where hungry men hung on boxcars looking for work that couldn't be found, shacks where families lived who didn't even have one swaybacked milk cow. He imagined cities where blood stained the sidewalks beneath buildings tall as ridges. He tried to imagine a place worse than where he was. — Ron Rash

The song was wistful as the ballads Slidell and the Clayton brothers played, except words weren't needed to feel the yearning. That made the music all the more sorrowful, because this song wasn't about one lost love or one dead child or parent. It was as if the music was about every loss that had ever been. — Ron Rash

I wouldn't mind being a track and field coach. — Ron Rash

He suspected the workers thought of Serena as beyond gender, the same as they might some phenomenon of nature such as rain or lightning. — Ron Rash

John Lane has long been recognized as one of the South's finest poets and memoirists. This debut establishes him as one of our finest novelists as well. His poet's eye for detail seamlessly merges with a born storyteller's gift for narrative. Fate Moreland's Widow gives voice to those who endured one of the most painful and neglected chapters in American history. — Ron Rash

The world is ripe, and we'll pluck it like an apple from a tree. — Ron Rash

I live in Cullowhee, North Carolina. That's where I teach, at Western Carolina University. That region is where my family has lived for a long time and that region is my landscape. — Ron Rash

I listened to time clicking like hooves on pavement. But time isn't something you can rein in. It moves on without pause, taking us with it no matter how much we wish it otherwise. — Ron Rash

On the last drafts, I focus on the words themselves, including the rub of vowels and consonants, stressed and unstressed syllables. Yet even at this stage I'm often surprised. A different ending or a new character shows up and I'm back to where I began, letting the story happen, just trying to stay out of the way. — Ron Rash

Like Flannery O'Connor, McCorkle's genius is to give us both philosophical speculation and a riveting narrative filled with unforgettable characters. Great writing, poignancy, humor, wisdom-all are in abundance here. Jill McCorkle is one of the South's greatest writers; she is also one of America's. — Ron Rash

I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories. — Ron Rash

Faulkner came from my region and taught me how you could write about a place. — Ron Rash

Rachel kneeled beside Jacob. She took the child's hand and pressed it to the dirt. Her father had told Rachel that Harmons had been on this land since before the Revolutionary War.
"Don't ever forget what it feels like, Jacob," she whispered, and let her hand touch the ground as well. — Ron Rash

My mother had brought me here when I was fifteen, on a Sunday after I'd read Look Homeward, Angel for the first time. She'd loved the novel, memorizing whole paragraphs, and, of course, naming me after the book's main character. It is a novel you have to read as a young person or you don't get it. — Ron Rash

The lift of her heart she'd felt on the outcrop she now felt again, and it wasn't just love. She'd felt love before, known its depths when her mother died.
This was something rarer. Happiness, Laurel thought, that must be what this is. — Ron Rash

Pemberton felt something shift inside him, something small but definite, the way a knob's slight twist allowed a door to swing wide open. — Ron Rash

Some of the highlanders considered the true Christmas to be on January fourteenth. Old Christmas, they called it, believing it was the day the magi visited the Christ child. — Ron Rash

I learnt how to hunt rattlesnakes with an eagle for 'Serena.' — Ron Rash

I think I had a particular moment when I was 15 years old. I read 'Crime and Punishment,' and that book just, I think, more than any other book made me want to be a writer, 'cause it was the first time that I hadn't just entered a book, but a book had entered me. — Ron Rash

'Cool-Hand Luke' is one of my favorite movies. — Ron Rash

The worst thing the nineteen sixties did to this country was introduce drugs to rednecks, — Ron Rash

Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can't see nothing. — Ron Rash

Don't love anything that can be taken away. — Ron Rash

He couldn't imagine such a moment, believed instead that Serena's beauty was like certain laws of math and physics, fixed and immutable — Ron Rash

Petrichord: the sound of water sliding over smooth stone. — Ron Rash

He carries what he feels for people deep inside. Even as a kid he was that way," Aunt Margaret said. "Your momma knows that." But I had wondered then as I did now what good love was that couldn't be expressed. — Ron Rash

She is waiting. Each spring the hard rains come and the creek rises and quickens, and more of the bank peels off, silting the water brown ad bringing to light another layer of dark earth, Decades pass. She is patient, shelled inside the blue tarp. Each spring the water laps closer, paling roots, loosening stones, scuffing and smoothing. She is waiting and one day a bit of blue appears in the bank and then more blue. The rain pauses and the sun appears but she is ready now and the bank trembles a moment and heaves the stands of tarp unfurl and she spills into the stream and is free. Bits of bone gather in an eddy, form a brief necklace. The current moves on toward the sea. — Ron Rash

Nietzsche once said "that for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts." I didn't believe that, but to willfully defy the quote was to tempt fate - and if to find it true, to know nothing remained but emptiness. — Ron Rash

Rachel felt the grief grow so wide and deep it felt like a dark fathomless pool she'd never emerge from. Because there was nothing left to do now, nothing except endure it. — Ron Rash

A mown hay field appears, its blond stubble blackened by a flock of starlings. As I pass, the field seems to lift, peek to see what's under itself, then resettles. A pickup passes from the other direction. The flock lifts again and this time keeps rising, a narrowing swirl as if sucked through a pipe and then an unfurl of rhythm sudden sprung, becoming one entity as it wrinkles, smooths out, drifts down like a snapped bedsheet. Then swerves and shifts, gathers and twists. Murmuration: ornithology's word-poem for what I see. — Ron Rash

Superstitions are just coincidence or ignorance. — Ron Rash

All the while remembering what it had felt like when the world you knew had up and vanished, and you needed to find something to bring that world back, and you weren't sure that you could. — Ron Rash

Then it became clear that it was a song, the loneliest sort of song because the notes changed so little, like one bird calling and waiting for another to answer. It was as lonely a sound as she'd ever heard. — Ron Rash

You got one choice at the beginning but if you didn't choose right, things got narrow real quick. — Ron Rash

An image came back to him with such vividness that it might have been framed before him in glass — Ron Rash

I usually do at least a dozen drafts and progressively make more-conscious decisions. Because I've always believed stories are closer to poems than novels, I spend a lot of time on the story's larger rhythms, such as sentence and paragraph length, placement of flashbacks and dialogue. — Ron Rash

Some claim heaven has streets of gold and all such things, but I hold a different notion. When we're there, we'll say to the angels, why, a lot of heaven's glory was in the place we come from. And you know what them angels will say? They'll say yes, pilgrim, and how often did you notice? What did you seek? — Ron Rash

After hours of wearing stifling suits while seated on rigid pews and high-backed dining chairs, to enter water and splay our limbs was freeing. The midday sun fell full on the pool, so when we waded in up to our waists, heat and cold balanced as if by a carpenter's level. That was the best sensation, knowing in a moment, but not quite yet, I'd dive into cold but emerge into warmth. Years later at Wake Forest, when I still believed I might create literature, I'd write a mediocre poem about those mornings in church and afterward the 'baptism of nature. — Ron Rash

I guess sometimes you've got the hope-fors so much it makes you imagine all sorts of things. — Ron Rash

A kind of annihilation, was what Serena called their coupling, and though Pemberton would never have thought to describe it that way, he knew her words had named the thing exactly. — Ron Rash

It's a hard place this world can be. No wonder a baby cries coming in to it. Tears from the start — Ron Rash

Jody had watched other classmates, including many in college prep, enter such a life with an impatient fatalism. They got pregnant or arrested or simply dropped out. Some boys, more defiant, filled the junkyards with crushed metal. Crosses garlanded with flowers and keepsakes marked roadsides where they'd died. You could see it coming in the smirking yearbook photos they'd left behind. — Ron Rash

I think that's what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place. — Ron Rash

Sometimes I know what my characters are moving away from or toward; more often I just wait and see. For instance, though I knew Sinkler in 'The Trusty' was going for water, I did not know that he would meet a fetching young farm wife until I got him into her front yard. — Ron Rash

Do this one thing. — Ron Rash

Nothing is but what is now — Ron Rash

Steve Yarbrough is a writer of many gifts, but what makes Safe from the Neighbors such a magnificent achievement is its moral complexity ... Safe from the Neighbors does what only the best novels can do; after reading it, we can never see the world, or ourselves, in quite the same way. — Ron Rash

A small profit it better than a big loss — Ron Rash

What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first ... it's amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood. — Ron Rash

What does eminent domain mean?" Stewart asked. "It means you're shit out of luck," Ross said. — Ron Rash

We want what's in this world but we also want what ain't. — Ron Rash

Not for the first time, it occurred to me that sorrow could be purified into song the same way a piece of coal is purified into a diamond. — Ron Rash

She had not remembered then what she remembers now, a memory like something buried in river silt that finally works free and rises to the surface ... — Ron Rash

How far could you trace back such a chain, he wondered, past the Harmon girl being chosen that night to bring his food, past the tree shattering a man's backbone due to a badly notched trunk, past that to an axe unsharpened because a man drank too much the night before, past that to why the man had gotten drunk in the first place? Was it something you never found the end to? Or was there no chain at all, just a moment when you did or didn't step close to a young woman and let you fingers brush a fall of blonde hair behind her ears, did or did not lean to that uncovered ear and tell her that you found her quite fetching." ~G. Pemberton (58) — Ron Rash

Maybe that was what happened when people grew up in a place where mountains shut them in, kept everything turned inward, buffered them from everything else. How long did it take before that landscape become internalized, was passed down from generation to generation like blood type or eye color? — Ron Rash

All we'll ever need is within each other," Serena said, her voice barely more than a whisper. "Even when we have our child, it will only be an image of what we already are. — Ron Rash

A Servant of History
Her eyes were of the lightest blue as if time had rinsed away most of the colour, but there was a liveliness inside them. — Ron Rash

I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go. — Ron Rash

Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present's surface. — Ron Rash

Maybe calling it being hitched ain't the prettiest way to say you're married, but it's the truth to my mind and true in a good way, because you're working together and depending on each other, and you're sharing the load. — Ron Rash

Dead and still in the world was worse than dead and in the ground. Dead in the ground at least gave you the hope of heaven. — Ron Rash

Spend a long time alone, especially if you're someone who's never been that social to begin with, and you find yourself craving solitude. — Ron Rash

He'd felt incredibly lucky they'd found one another, though Serena had already told him their meeting wasn't mere good fortune but inevitability. — Ron Rash

Intensely moving but never sentimental, Academy Street is a profound meditation on what Faulkner called 'the human heart in conflict with itself'. In Tess Lohan, Mary Costello has created one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction. What a marvel of a book. — Ron Rash

The woman doesn't look up. It's as if she's deaf. Maybe she is. Maybe she's like the Cambodian women I've read about, the ones who witnessed so many atrocities that they have willed themselves blind. Maybe that's what you have to do sometimes to survive. You kill off part of yourself, your hearing or eyesight, your capacity for hope. — Ron Rash

A place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world — Ron Rash

A brown trout sips one off the surface. Beneath the trout, mica-flecked sand gleams white. Come fall the female's caudal fin will nudge the grains to make a nest, the eggs spilling like pearls into a purse. — Ron Rash

I turn onto North Market Street to pass Thomas Wolfe's house. I'd planned to do my dissertation on Wolfe. My advisor argued against it. Wolfe is all but forgotten now, she said, which seemed all the more reason to do it, so he would not be forgotten, or only, as Wolfe himself wrote, by the wind grieved. The — Ron Rash

Peter Geye has rendered the Minnesota north shore in all its stark, dangerous beauty, and it is the perfect backdrop for this deeply moving story of conflict and forgiveness. Safe from the Sea is a remarkable debut. — Ron Rash

One guy has his head on a table, eyes closed, vomit drooling from his mouth. Another pulls out his false teeth and clamps them on the ear of a gal at the next table. An immense woman in a purple jumpsuit is crying while another woman screams at her. And what I'm thinking is maybe it's time to halt all human reproduction. Let God or evolution or wathever put us here in the first place start again from scratch, because this isn't working. — Ron Rash

I don't even have a choice. Rachel thought how that was pretty much true of everything now, that you got one choice at the beginning but if you didn't choose right, and she hadn't, things got narrow real quick. Like trying to wade a river, she thought. You take a wrong step and set your foot on a wobbly rock or in a drop-off and you're swept away, and all you can do then is try to survive. (83) — Ron Rash

Having shot down a number, some of which were anly wounded, the whole flock swept repeatedly around their prostrate companions, and again settled on a low tree, within twenty yards of the spot where I stood. At each successive discharge, though showers of them fell, yet the affection of the survivors seemed rather to increase; for after a few circuits around the place, they again alighted near me. — Ron Rash

We had some good times at school. I didn't know how good those times was till I left, but I guess that's the way of it — Ron Rash

A great business investment, religion. I'll take it over government bonds anytime. — Ron Rash

Of course, who can forget that first love, or first sex, or first drink - especially if they all occur together. I also remember how, after Ligeia had left our lives, I'd worried for months that she might reappear and tell Bill what I'd never confessed to him. But after a while nostalgia supplanted guilt and our summer at Panther Creek became more a tender coming-of-age story, a summer of love complete with bucolic setting. — Ron Rash

But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don't need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life. — Ron Rash

She walks in beauty. — Ron Rash

It struck her how eating was a comfort during a hard time because it reminded you that there had been other days, good days, when you'd eaten the same thing. Reminded you there were good days in life, when precious little else did. (268) — Ron Rash

Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader. — Ron Rash

The world lies all before us. — Ron Rash

You are not quite ready yet, though. For the next six months, practice until your arms ache and your lips bleed. The suffering will be good for you. A slight smile crossed the conductor's face. If you haven't already found a woman who will break your heart, find one. What we played tonight, especially the Mozart, requires suffering. — Ron Rash

She realized that being starved for words was the same as being starved for food, because both left a hollow place inside you, a place you needed filled to make it through another day. Rachel remembered how growing up she'd thought living on a farm with just a father was as lonely as you could be. (130) — Ron Rash

She'd never known fear had a taste, but it did. — Ron Rash

Then her mind had wandered into a place she could not follow, taking with it all the people she knew, their names and connections, whether they still lived or whether they'd died. But her body lingered, shed of an inner being, empty as a cicada husk. — Ron Rash

As I get older I find myself thinking it all begins with Shakespeare. — Ron Rash

But as Rachel watched the sheriff enter the front door, it was hard to believe the farmhouse itself was still there, because a place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world. The earth itself shouldn't be able to abide it. — Ron Rash